The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of ColoradoBrady, Cyrus Townsend
General
The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Colorado -- Fiction; Love stories; Western stories
Now he was paying the penalty of that isolation. Men were made to live
with one another, and no one could violate that law natural, or by so
long an inheritance as to have so become, without paying that penalty.
His ideas of loyalty and fidelity were warped, his conceptions of his
duty were narrow. There was something noble in his determination, it is
true, but there was something also very foolish. The dividing line
between wisdom and folly is sometimes as indefinite as that between
comedy and tragedy, between laughter and tears. If the woman he had
married and killed had only hated him and he had known, it would have
been different, but since he believed so in her love he could do nothing
else.
At that period in her reflections Enid Maitland saw a great light. The
woman had not loved her husband after all, she had loved another. That
passion of which he had dreamed had not been for him. By a strange chain
of circumstances Enid Maitland held in her hand the solution of the
problem. She had but to give him these letters to show him that his
golden image had stood upon feet of clay, that the love upon which he
had dwelt was not his. Once convinced of that he would come quickly to
her arms. She cried a prayer of blessing on old Kirkby and started to
her feet, the letters in hand, to call Newbold back to her and tell him,
and then she stopped.
Woman as she was, she had respect for the binding conditions and laws of
honor as well as he. Chance, nay, Providence, had put the honor of this
woman, her rival, in her hands. The world had long since forgotten this
poor unfortunate; in no heart was her memory cherished save in that of
her husband. His idea of her was a false one, to be sure, but not even
to procure her own happiness could Enid Maitland overthrow that ideal,
shatter that memory.
She sat down again with the letters in her hand. It had been very simple
a moment since, but it was not so now. She had but to show him those
letters to remove the great barrier between them. She could not do it.
It was clearly impossible. The reputation of her dead sister who had
struggled so bravely to the end was in her hands, she could not
sacrifice her even for her own happiness.
Quixotic, you say? I do not think so. She had blundered unwittingly,
unwillingly, upon the heart secret of the other woman, she could not
betray it. Even if the other woman had been really unfaithful in deed as
well as in thought to her husband, Enid could hardly have destroyed his
recollection of her. How much more impossible it was since the other
woman had fought so heroically and so successfully for her honor.
Womanhood demanded her silence. Loyalty, honor, compelled her silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account